YouTube Says China-Linked Comment Deletions Weren't Caused By Outside Parties (theverge.com) 51
YouTube sparked widespread speculation about its moderation policies this week after it admitted to accidentally deleting comments that contained phrases critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Today, the company told The Verge that the issue was not the result of outside interference -- an explanation for the error floated by many. The Verge reports: The phrases that triggered automatic deletion included "communist bandit" and "50-cent party," a slang term for internet users paid to defend the CCP. Some speculated that an outside group, perhaps connected to the CCP, manipulated YouTube's automated filters by repeatedly reporting these phrases, causing the algorithm to tag them as offensive. Speaking to The Verge, YouTube spokesperson Alex Joseph denied that this happened and said that, contrary to popular belief, YouTube never removes comments only on the basis of user reports.
"This was not the result of outside interference, and we only remove content when our enforcement system determines it violates our Community Guidelines, not solely because it's flagged by users," said Joseph. "This was an error with our enforcement systems and we have rolled out a fix."
"This was not the result of outside interference, and we only remove content when our enforcement system determines it violates our Community Guidelines, not solely because it's flagged by users," said Joseph. "This was an error with our enforcement systems and we have rolled out a fix."
Not even denying it anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
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Either way they come out looking like gigantic assholes.
If it was the result of outside interference then they lose technical credibility.
If it wasn't, then they have built a system to enable nationalistic censorship which is already pre-loaded with an "appease China" data set.
Re:Not even denying it anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I wonder if YouTube will lose its safe haven status in the wake of Trump's executive order against those social media companies that exercise editorial curation rather than being content-agnostic.
Given that YouTube already actively shadow-bans those who post flat-earth videos or who claim the moon landing was a hoax, it's clear that they do exercise considerable editorial control over the content they deliver. This is surely then a violation of the trust required under S230 of the Communications & Decency Act and therefore Trump's planned changes will leave then sorely exposed.
Let's hope!
(For the record: I don't think the earth is flat or that the moon landing was a hoax but I believe the morons who do fall for this stuff have every bit as much right to voice their opinions as anyone else) -- Youtube however, strictly penalises anyone who doesn't sing from *their* hymn book and that's got to erode their safe haven status.
Re: Not even denying it anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Not even denying it anymore (Score:4, Informative)
That's what having carrier status is all about and that's what safe-haven requires. You must take down illegal material (deemed by law to be objectionable or breaching copyright/trademark) but you can't start editing on the basis that the posts are not aligned with your own ideologies or beliefs -- that turns you into a publisher with all the resulting liabilities that publishers face.
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That's not what the law says. The law says you can censor content that is "objectionable", which can basically mean anything.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]
(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
Anyway YouTube doesn't take those videos down, it just doesn't pay people for making them or rank them high up in search results which to call "editing" is a stretch to say the least. Also a can of worms, for example would you want people suing museums because the curators didn't select their "evidence" that the world is only 3000 years old for displa
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Absolutely not. That is for telcos. Websites get the right to remove content and still not be liable for what people post from another law. The CDA, IIRC.
This is what Trump wants to change. If he succeeds you'll be right. But you aren't.
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Silly me,I listened to what the president said.
Maybe you should try it sometime, it will make it harder to lie
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P.S. just saw the clip of him saying he wanted to change section 230 of the Communications Decency Act from Fox News. HTH HAND
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You get it, too many other people do not.
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You let the poster of the vid choose the level of filtering on their comments. That still keeps the impetus in control of the poster. Only suggest vids that say 75% of similarly profiled users like unless you want to opt in for a wider suggestion pool. All of that seems well within the purview of existing capability youtube employs. So basically you can choose a like minded curated version of youtube or you can choose the wild west version as an opt in. I would imagine that other sites could use simila
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> What's to keep every social network from devolving into 4chan?
4chan is a reflection of the problem -- a symptom that people don't value Integrity, Honor, and being Civil. See Penny Arcade's GIFT [knowyourmeme.com] (Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory).
> Just don't moderate?
Decades of Usenet proved that doesn't work.
However, the opposite, censorship, is not the solution either. i.e. WHO decides WHAT to censor?
Moderation seems to a step in the right direction to prevent spam and crap-flooding. The question then becomes W
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Yeah reddit is real shit show at times.
Who the fuck downvotes someone asking a question???
On reddit it seems like the majority are dumb teens who down-vote anything that isn't _exactly_ the same as their opinion.
Re: Not even denying it anymore (Score:2)
Slashdot's old angry libertarians prove that a 40 year old conservative man can be just as dumb as a 30 year old liberal sparklepony.
Re: Not even denying it anymore (Score:2)
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Actually, I wonder if YouTube will lose its safe haven status in the wake of Trump's executive order against those social media companies that exercise editorial curation rather than being content-agnostic.
His executive order didn't do anything. All he did was ask regulators to clarify when websites lose safe haven status, and the law is clear: you can editorialize and not lose protections.
It's going to take a complete change of law by congress to make any change, and the house will not pass anything that improves Trump's chances of re-election. So Twitter can keep censoring, and so can youtube.
Re: Not even denying it anymore (Score:1)
Re: Not even denying it anymore (Score:1)
Re:Not even denying it anymore (Score:4, Informative)
So Google admits it has CCP operatives within the company. Wow!
Every large tech company does. I'm no fan of Google, but this is hardly an embarrassing admission. If you're recruiting engineers from China, and why wouldn't you if you're shopping overseas for cheap talent at all, then some percentage of them will be government agents. Even a government like China's has its grass-root loyalists, who sincerely believe the government is great.
What Google should be embarrassed by is the failure of the system of checks and balances that's supposed to keep crap code in general from being checked in. What went wrong there? There's no way people are checking in changes to something like YouTube without a code review, so why wasn't this caught? It's possible that this was part of an innocuous change made by one agent, code reviewed by another, and no one else bothered to look at it.
But I rather think this was a change to data, rather than code, that was done without the rigor of a code review. Every giant embarrassing cloud failure I've seen close up, from Amazon breaking S3 and DynamoDB, to Microsoft firewalling off all its customers from its servers, to some equally embarassing stuff on my own team, all of them weren't code changes. They were something else - a change to a network setting, or a commonplace administrative runbook, or a routine key rotation, that went horribly wrong because the general-purpose change-control system is no where near as good as a code review at spotting bugs. And someone doing it on purpose? Easiest thing in the world to slip into a routine change control doc without anyone asking questions.
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This is the problem with conspiracy theories. The moment one gets debunked the believers just double down with an even deeper conspiracy.
It's also quite shocking how people can't see the obvious parallels with what they are saying now and McArthyism. It's literally evidence-free accusations that random people are members of the Communist Party.
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YouTube says China-linked comment deletions weren& (Score:1)
Not a real denial (Score:4, Insightful)
YouTube never removes comments only on the basis of user reports ... "we only remove content when our enforcement system determines it violates our Community Guidelines, not solely because it's flagged by users"
"only" "solely". These are strawman wiggle words. If the user reports form 99% of the trigger for deletion, then Google's denial would still technically be true.
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They openly hired a CCP VP for Chief of AI (Score:4, Interesting)
Google hired Li Fei Fei as Chief of AI - she is a known member of the communist party of China. Now, she is on the board at Twitter, just in time to check the "accuracy" of Trump's lovely tweets. This is just the tiniest part of the tip of the iceberg of Chinese CCP members in active positions in US tech companies.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/1... [cnbc.com]
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That's interesting. I've noticed the Communist party has been infiltrating many companies in many countries.
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Google hired Li Fei Fei as Chief of AI - she is a known member of the communist party of China.
This appears to be a baseless rumour. Your link doesn't mention the CCP or communism at all. I did some searching but no credible sources making this claim could be found. It appears to be a simple slander against her and an attempt to discredit Google.
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Not exactly the smoking gun, but my chinese literacy is limited to about 4 characters and.... google translate =D
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Inconvenient Truths by Jennifer Zeng:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
So What? (Score:2)
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You actually sound like a member of the 50 cent army ()! I am not saying this as flamebait, but you really are deflecting attention away from the key issue here which is just how compromised is youtube? You distract with counter-allegations that CCP is no worse than other bad actors.
Re: So What? (Score:1)
Does it hurt? Yes? Then call him a Chicom troll, mod him down into oblivion and have a beer for a job well done!
It's the slashdot way.
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Prove you aren't a paid CCP operative by posting what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
End your post with "Xi the Pooh".
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Who care inside or outside? (Score:3)
I can see at least four ways this was accomplished:
1) automated or semi-automated complaints by CCP against their targets.
2) CCP operatives working for Youtube and/or Google did this on their own.
3) CCP operatives managed to convince non CCP-linked people working for Youtube/Google to do this.
4) CCP operatives broke into Youtube servers and added their own censorship code.
I don't see how this could possibly be an accident. In any case, there is something very seriously wrong, possibly criminally.
I've dealt with nationalist coworkers (Score:2)
I've had coworkers from China who were totally on board with their country's propaganda. They exist in the tech industry, and they work in Silicon Valley. There aren't a lot of people like that here, and I like to think their resolve to defend their country's lies tends to dwindle the longer they are working at a six-figure tech job in Silicon Valley.
My response to her was: You can believe that and even say that here if you want. The difference is I can't go to China and safely say what I believe.
My two Tai
I call bullshit (Score:3)
The claim, "YouTube never removes comments only on the basis of user reports" is simply not believable. When this was happening, I posted a comment with the triggering words on a video about a CCP aircraft carrier. In under a minute my comment was deleted. My posting history said I never even posted the comment. There is no way in hell it could have happened that fast if it required a human complaint and a human followup, therefore the only plausible explanation is there is automatic deletion code that triggers on key words and phrases without human intervention. I'm not the only person to test this. I did it as a followup to someone else's post that it was happening. The other person had reported equally fast deletions.
Alex Joseph is a liar. Plain and simple. He's clearly trying to cover something up. Whether it was rogue employee who injected the deletion code or youtube is China's bitch is the question. The former can be forgiven, but shows a clear lack of internal controls on important code. The latter shows a business who has sold out our country to foreign agents.
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If you bothered to read the entire summary they said that it was a bug in the automated system, nothing to do with user reports.
They have an automatic system for blocking spam, that's why the comments on videos are not full of ads voted up by bots. And they are saying it went wrong.
They only mentioned user reports because there was a rumour that Chinese government employees were mass reporting comments and hitting some kind of threshold.
Oh, and also the owner of the video can delete comments too. That happe
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You can bet (Score:2)